I've been meaning to come back to this thread. In particular, thanks, Ann, for that wonderful poem by Kit Wright. I love "veined with similarity".
Here's the Hecht passage on the Bellini painting, which I mentioned earlier:
From
"See Naples and Die":
See, what a perfect day. It’s perhaps three
In the afternoon, if one may judge by the light.
Windless and tranquil, with enough small clouds
To seem like innocent, grazing flocks of heaven.
The air is bright with a thickness of its own,
Enveloping the cool and perfect land,
Where earthly flocks wander and graze at peace
And men converse at ease beside a road
Leading to towers, to battlements and hills,
As a farmer guides his cattle through a maze
Of the chipped and broken headstones of the dead.
All this, serene and lovely as it is,
Serves as mere background to Bellini’s painting,
Of
The Transfiguration. Five dazzled apostles,
Three as if just awakening from sleep,
Surround a Christ whose eyes seem to be fixed
On something just behind and above our heads,
Invisible unless we turned, and then
The mystery would indeed still be behind us.
A rear-view mirror might perhaps reveal
Something we cannot see, outside the picture
But yet implied by Bellini’s art.
Whatever it is seems to be understood
By the two erect apostles, one being Peter,
The other possibly John, both of them holding
Fragments of scroll with Hebrew lettering,
Which they appear just to have been consulting.
Their lowered eyes indicate that, unseeing,
They have seen everything, have understood
The entire course of human history,
The meaning and the burden of the lives
Of Samson, Jonah and Melchizedek,
Isaiah’s and Zechariah’s prophecies,
The ordinance of destiny, the flow
And tide of providential purposes.
All hope, all life, all effort has assembled
And taken human shape in the one figure
There in the midst of them this afternoon.
And what event could be more luminous?
His birth had been at night, and at his death
The skies would darken, graves give up their dead.
But here, between, was a day so glorious
As to explain and even justify
All human misery and suffering.
Or so, at least, perhaps, the artist felt,
And so we feel, gazing upon a world
From which all pain has cleanly been expunged
By a pastoral hand, moving in synchronous
Obedience to a clear and pastoral eye.
(And here's a
link to the painting.)
Hybrid Mode
